


Feral Chic

by Konori



Category: ARK: Survival Evolved, Iron Man (Comics), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - ARK: Survival Evolved, BAMF Tony, Extremis Tony Stark, Gen, M/M, Mostly MCU Tony, Multi, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark Hates Magic, Tony Stark is So Done With Magic, Winter Soldier is a separate personality, bits and pieces from Iron Man comics (extremis), it's my jam, slightly Dark Alt Steve Rogers, the ARK: Survival Evolved mashup nobody asked for
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 16:18:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18832204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Konori/pseuds/Konori
Summary: Tony Stark is so fuckingdonewith magic.So.Done.Not only was he forcibly transported to another universe because some dipshits came late to the party androyallyscrewed the pooch in observation skills; he's now stuck in this other universe with said dipshits and only Friday to keep him company.Fuck VoD with a serrated spoon.





	Feral Chic

**Author's Note:**

> So I saw Endgame the day after release and I'm still recovering. And by recovering I mean my brain is stuck on Marvel stories and nothing else because omfg the feels and my _soul_ is dearly departed, and I NEED ALL THE FIX-IT FICS DAMNIT. Also, I've been playing ARK, so this shit happened... and it's stuck in my brain now so it is yet _another_ story to the repertoire, sigh.
> 
> Let me know what you think about what I've written so far in the comments!

Tony comes to with a jerk as Friday takes control of the suit and fires at something approaching them too quickly for him to register what it is.

“What the hell?” he gasps out, leaning against his knees when his baby girl gives him back control, staring at the smoking corpse of... “Fri?”

“It appears to have been a dinosaur, Boss.”

“A _what_?” he asks again because he’s positive the blow to the head he took earlier is making him hear things.

“Dinosaur, Boss. Kinda like you,” she sasses him.

“You’ve been talking to Peter and Karen too much,” he grumbles.

Tony straightens up and looks around. He wills himself not to have a panic attack when all he sees are trees, metalwork of some kind, other dinosaurs meandering about further away -they don’t look like they are about to rush over and eat him, so he takes that as a win-, and that he’s in a giant cavern of some sort with spotty surface light filtering down from the holes in the ceiling.

“Fri, where the hell are we?”

“Unclear, Boss. The metal structures are hindering the scanners, and I’m disconnected from the servers.”

He stills as what she says registers.

“Then how the hell are you with me?”

There’s a long pause before she replies.

“I may have uploaded myself to you after Extremis and the nanobots settled.”

“You did _what_?” he nearly shrieks.

“It was the only way I wouldn’t be disconnected from you again!”

He can _feel_ it; the fear she has at not being able to reach him. It brushes against his consciousness before his baby girl seems to realize she’s projecting loudly and shuts it behind a flimsy firewall.

Because she _wants_ him to know but doesn’t want to bombard him.

Tony takes a deep breath and lets it out. The thought of sharing headspace is Maximoff levels of terrifying -flashes of the bitch using her mind shit on him nearly knocks him over with anxiety before Extremis and the bots regulate it like they were programmed too- but this is _Friday_ in his head. If he could trust anyone up in there, it would be his baby girl.

Besides he knows how she feels about the disconnected part; it’s part of the reason he injected himself with the Extremis/nanotech combo and had an upgraded Arc put back in his chest to power the nanobots inside him and the Arc unit, as well as keep Extremis from sucking him dry if something went to shit.

He wasn’t going to be stranded anywhere with no way to contact anyone or get his ass out of the fire ever again.

Fri just made it more permanent. No wonder she has been acting more human. She's learning directly from him. That isn’t exactly a good thing…

“Hope it’s not too terrifying in there, baby girl.”

“It’s actually quite fascinating and much different then the server farm,” she says, her Irish lilt more pronounced the more excited she gets. “The human brain is-”

“Yea, no. I don’t need to know how cramped my brain is.”

“Your mind is quite vast, Boss. I hardly take up any space.”

“Oh, well then-”

A roar interrupts him, jolting him back into the reality of their situation.

“Right, dinosaurs. Fri, bring up the Mark’s status. I don’t want to use the Bleeding Edge until I absolutely need to.”

“The Mark’s integrity is stable and only has minimal cosmetic damage, though the left repulsor boot could use some maintenance to keep it in operating order.”

“How long until it starts crapping out on me?” he asks as he eyeballs the area.

Those metal rings may have circuitry in them…

“If used lightly and it doesn’t sustain any damage, it should last a few weeks. One week if you use it at continuous high-speeds.”

“Good enough. Up we go.”

Seconds later he’s activated the magnets in the boots and is standing on top of the ring before he asks Friday for another scan.

“So… when Rhodey kept looking at me weird, was that because you were talking directly to me instead of the Compounds speakers?”

“... That’s a possibility.”

“You’re such a _troll_ , baby girl.”

“I learned from the best,” she says primly. “Scanners still knackered, Boss. There’s some sort of interference when I try to penetrate past the cavern walls. But they do pick up circuitry within the ring and most of the metalwork in the area. I’m also detecting a… holoscreen?”

Now _that’s_ intriguing.

“Where about?”

The HUD displays a three-dimensional map to lead him, and he deactivates the magnets, falling backward and free falling for a moment before the repulsors activate. The dinosaurs scatter, honking and braying in alarm as he streaks by overhead. Their destination is surprisingly close to where Tony had woken up. He grins when he sees the holoscreen which morphs into a scowl as he notices the keyboard attached.

“So much for advanced,” he grumbles. “Fri, is the air safe?”

“Yes. Though if it wasn’t, I’m sure Extremis would adapt your lungs for it.”

“And how painful that would be,” he muses as he steps from the Mark and starts messing with the console.

“Probably about as painful as when Extremis was injected and fixed your lungs the first time.”

“ _That_ was rhetorical.”

“Oh.”

“You’ll get there.”

The console is remarkably easy to figure out. It becomes even more straightforward when Tony finds a connection port of some kind. He activates a few of the nanobots and the armor shifts around his pointer finger, shaping into the form of the connection port.

“I’m Inspector Gadget,” he giggles. “I always wanted to do that.”

“It would have been more impressive if you put your hand on it and absorbed the information,” Fri says dryly.

“You have ridiculous standards.”

“One of us has to.”

Tony chuckles, deciding his girl has a point. Collapsing the nanobots back into his body and the Arc unit, he lays his hands on the console and concentrates on the machine he can feel pulsing around him. The information hits him like a bottle of straight scotch used to and he's not sure how long he's connected before the information stream stops. He stumbles back from the console, falling on his ass as he clutches his aching head -Extremis had only just gotten rid of his headache from his earlier head trauma.

“Maybe we should have waited for Extremis to completely clear your concussion, too. I had no idea information could hurt,” she says tightly, obviously as affected as he is by the info dump.

“Noted,” he groans. “Set the Mark to sentry mode while we wallow in pain for a bit.”

“On it, Boss.”

When the pain finally passes, and the information stored away in his mind to sort through later, does he heave himself up onto his feet asking Fri how long they were down. It's darker than it had been when they downloaded the information.

“One hour, Boss.”

“That’s inconvenient. Time passes much quicker here.”

“I doubt we’ll need to do it again, Boss.”

“I hope not. It’s a good thing I couldn’t do that when SHIELD fell,” he says, looking up to where the sunlight had been filtering down into the cave system.

It’s dusk now where it had been about noon when he woke. Again, the accelerated time cycles were going to be annoying until he creates long-lasting light sources. This time he commands the Mark to encase him and takes off back to where he woke up.

“How long was I out before we were attacked?”

“Several hours after I relocated you here.”

“How did we get here? I thought the Mark was disrupting portal assholes’ magic and we were just dealing with whatever shit he pulled out of them.”

He lands atop the ring above the corpse of the dinosaur that attacked, letting the suit do a more detailed scan of the area while he comes up with a plan of action.

“Hell, magic shit is supposed to be handled by Oz and his cultists, _not_ me,” he grumbles. “We’re short staffed as it is.”

“There was… unexpected interference,” she tells him, ignoring his bitching.

“In the form of?”

“Rogers and Barnes, Boss,” she says with such disdain it surprises him. “The enemy had thrown another portal at you when they tackled you, assuming they meant to push you out of the way, of course, and the magic latched onto them, and consequently, _us_.”

It all comes back to him as she speaks, sending a jolt of tension up his neck through to his left temple. The idiot had shown up late to the fight and hadn’t seen VoD’s -Tony hadn’t bothered to remember the dick’s villain name- magic dissipate before it could throw him through a portal. The damn things were like homing missiles, following until they engulf their target. Tony had seen the magic dissipate when it got too close several times before he realized something about the Mark disrupted VoD’s magic and went for the asshole hard. Unfortunately, VoD had noticed too and started making portals that pulled things out from wherever he created them. Tony had to deal with that and keep the civilians safe instead of focusing on the bastard until the Brazilian police could organize themselves enough to be effective. At least they were listening to his instructions to get the people out instead of taking pot-shots at the asshole.

It was just as all the civilians in the area were cleared that Tony had noticed St- _Rogers_ helping the last of the people to the police. Obviously, VoD had too, and he knew Rogers would try and save him, so another blast of magic, one idiot, and they were portaled here. Or rather, _two_ idiots. He hadn’t noticed Barnes’ presence, and that’s unsettling.

So now, they are on the ARK -dubbed Aberration after-shit-went-down edition, according to the data he downloaded from the console. One of the hundreds of ARK that some sentient… beings ‘spawn’ people -through a process he can't quite wrap his head around- from different time periods into and let them loose to try and survive enough to ‘ascend’; whatever that means.

“Where _are_ the wayward sons?”

“... I may have relocated us as far from them as possible while they were still unconscious.”

“Friday!”

“I moved them to a relatively safe spot before I did!”

“Friday-”

“They left you to die in Siberia! If I hadn’t gotten a signal out before Rogers destroyed the reactor, you would be dead.”

Tony has to sit when her emotions bombard him with forever remembered -because machines like them _never_ forget- fear, betrayal, and her rage at Rogers and Barnes for what they did to him.

To _them_ because Friday was there too. Had worked with them and protected them as Tony had.

“I had to keep you safe from them,” she nearly pleads with him to understand.

And really? He gets it. He’d do the same with Peter, Rhodey, Pepper, Happy, the bots, and Fri too.

“I know, baby girl,” he sighs, staring unseeing at the cavern wall as he decides what needs to be done immediately.

“Where’d you leave them anyway?”

“Tied high up in the trees.”

Tony laughs until Extremis activates to keep his ribs from hurting.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tony spends the night magnetized up on the ring, absorbing, assimilating, and sorting the data, all the while sighing at the stupidity of some people. The original survivors of this ARK had messed with something at the core of it and sent the surface into fiery chaos. The only ‘safe place’ for anything is underground until the sun sets -even then it's not a great idea going up there. Some idiot named Santiago set off a bomb at the core some time ago -and yea, Tony understands wanting to survive whatever the ‘Overseer’ sent to kill them, but still- and fucking up the controls for the _atmosphere_. At least his fuck up kept the ARK from taking a scan of him. The records of what happened on the Scorched Earth ARK heavily implied Inquisition level purge for those too far ahead of some standard the 'beings' decided on.

He’s obviously _way_ more advanced than any person on this ARK has ever been, and Santiago came from a time where tech was highly developed. He doesn’t have one of those specimen implants either, so whatever’s left of the ‘Overseer’ can’t track or scan him. That being said, Tony doesn’t want to tempt fate right now. He’s going to have to lay low and to do that he’s got to adapt as they did.

Well, like some of them did.

Which means taming dinos.

“This is like every kid’s dream come true,” he muses as he mentally flips through the dossiers made by someone named Helena to see which creature would fit his needs.

“What is, Boss?” his girl asks, metaphysically looking over his shoulder as he speeds through them.

“Having a pet dinosaur.”

“Hm… most of these are dinosaurs, but the ones most useful in this environment are more like fantasy creatures.”

“Like what?”

He ‘watches’ Fri flip through the dossiers until she selects one to ‘show’ him.

“The Rock Drake, Boss. It’s the apex predator in the caverns and only known creature on this ARK that can fight another creature called a ‘Reaper’.”

She pulls up another dossier beside the Drake’s, and Tony looks at the drawing of the Reaper in confusion.

“Why the hell does that remind me of the alien from that movie?”

“It does have an uncanny resemblance,” Fri muses. “But as long as we don’t travel too deep in, we shouldn’t run into any.”

Tony looks over the Rock Drake dossier.

“Hate to break it to ya, baby girl, but the Drakes seem to make their nest _pretty_ damn close to them. The only way I’m getting a Drake is to raise one, which means we gotta go down there and swipe some eggs.”

“Of course we do,” she seems to sigh. “Better get on that boot repair, Boss. Radiation down there can get high, and I doubt we want to let Extremis reconfigure your DNA again.”

“About as much as I’d want a lobotomy,” Tony grumbles, looking at the damaged boot Fri puts on the HUD and decides he'll be subtle later; he needs some music right about now. “Let’s get to work then. Play me some tunes, baby girl.”

ACDC blasts from the suit speakers as he sits down on the ring and starts opening it up.


End file.
